For those of you who are interested in using or trying Microsoft development tools, I’m happy to report that Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is now available.

If you’re interested in:

• concurrency and parallel computing, check out the new concurrency runtime (ConcRT) that implements efficient work stealing for scalable code, the Asynchronous Agents Library and the Parallel Patterns Library (PPL) for C++, and the Task Parallel Library (TPL) and Parallel LINQ (PLINQ) for .NET. And some nifty concurrency debugging and profiling tools, too.
• C++0x features, check out the lambda functions (my fave), move-semantic rvalue references, the new auto, its good friend decltype, and the ever-helpful static_assert.
• functional programming in VS, enjoy the F# programming language.

Remember this is just a beta and not intended for production use, but there’s a lot of cool stuff to play around with and it should run fine side-by-side with VS2008. Feedback via forums or filing a bug/suggestion is always appreciated. Enjoy!